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SETI Project Scientist Discusses Prospects
An anonymous reader writes "Today Astrobiology Magazine interviewed SETI@home Project Scientist, Dan Wertheimer, about subjects including the first detailed 'best of SETI' candidate reobservations for repeating telescope acquisition on the most promising 166 star candidates. Their policy is not to release precise sky coordinates on the best ones yet (so far a signal called SHGb11+15a), with this type of Gaussian signal shape. The candidates number some 400 million Gaussians and 5.7 billion spikes."
Because the networks haven't been putting out anything but complete and utter crap. Maybe some alien crap will be better.
damn, i didn't think clearchannel had THAT much influence
Forget it. They're laughing at us. We're trying to find transmissions based on how we'd transmit data now. We're looking for smoke signals from civilizations that use Wavelet enncoded HDTV. We're trying to find cizilizations similar to our own; intellegent species have probably advanced way beyond some local interplanetary WIFI model. They're probably chuckling at our feeble attempts right now. Chuckling in their own vieny large headed kind of way. Puny humans.
Why, of course we'll decode it. Then, we'll find the instructions to build a capsule of some sort. Well, of course all the governments will go bankrupt (or very close) building it for it to get sabotaged by some idiot. Then, an odd and insanely rich person will decide to build one in secret so that they can carry out the test... wait.. I think I've seen this all somewhere before...
bork bork bork!
After we get signal, you ask?
Main screen turn on, of course.
I have been pwned because my
It'll probably turn out to be an alien goatse when they finally get it decoded.
<Marvin the Martian>
Where was the blood-curdling scream? There was supposed to be an "Ahhh! My Eyes!!!" scream!
</Marvin the Martian>
--
What will be the next step after we detect a signal?
/. them into oblivion!
Clearly, we will
The study also mentioned that they processed the radiotelescope signal to extract the audio component. Listen to SHGb11+15a.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
"Oh my god, it's full of .... EEEUUUUWWWWWWW!!!"
Nothing in these stories specify why they're not releasing the co-ordinates yet, and I thought Slashdot readers might be particularly interested in this.
I work at a computer lab which is used by a branch of a certain space agency (not NASA, but they have similar policies) and we process a lot of data for these folks (It's a bit like SETI@Home, but we get what are called the 'higher level' packets, given only to accredited packets of ramen.)
When you're dealing with signals from large distances (over a few thousand miles) you need a lot of gain on your aerial to get a strong signal. This is why they use giant dishes at places like Aribico, because the largeness of dish allows the signal to be taken and magnified when it gets here, so you get a clearer signal from a noisy signal (for the non scientific people here.. it's like how in CSI they can zoom in a noisy picture and 'clean it up' or look round corners and stuff).
Well, this high gain aerial 'sucks up' (again, non science speak) a lot of the signal. This means if they gave out the co-ordinates everyone would try to listen in to the stuff coming from that area, and diminish all of the signal so that SETI couldn't pick up anything even on their big aerials. It's kinda like how if a radio station has more listeners, they have to turn the signal up.. but we can't tell the aliens to do that!
The same thing happens with light, but to a lesser extent. Theoretically if you had a million people looking at a single LED, the light would be so spread out that it would appear to go off. This is why, as children, we're told not to look at the sun, because if we all did that, we would be plunged into darkness.
Anyway, I hope that cleared it all up.
mogorific carpentry experiments
And if he does we can always just have him nailed to a cross or something...
I'm just kidding! We're talking about Linux users here, not a bunch of zealo...oh, wait...
do not read this line twice.